MUSIC. BACKSTAGE PASS.

Graham Parker's rollercoaster ride

October 05, 2001|By Kevin McKeough. Special to the Tribune.

Over the course of Graham Parker's 25-year recording career, the raspy-voiced songwriter has fired off blistering assaults on religion and record companies, laid his heart bare on tender-hearted love ballads, tackled subjects as big as AIDS and abortion, and given hilariously vexed accounts of his experiences as a father.

"It's weird to look back and realize how complex I am," Parker says jokingly. "It's kind of difficult to go through a day if you're me, I'm on a rollercoaster."

The ride continues on his new CD, "Deepcut to Nowhere." Over snarling guitars and a reggae-flavored groove, the opening song, "Dark Days," paints a picture of the world on the brink of cataclysm that chillingly foreshadows the current terrorism crisis.

"These days most people feel a catastrophe could happen at any minute," Parker observes. "But that's just one song, and then I'm whining about a bad gig in Jacksonville," he adds. "Luckily that album has many moods."

Those moods include the hauntingly lovely acoustic guitar ballad "Blue Horizon," on which Parker reflects on his childhood. (Deepcut is the name of the small English village where Parker grew up, "and nowhere is where I've been ever since," he quips.)

There's also the R&B-drenched "Tough On Clothes," the latest in a series of songs that have found Parker flummoxed by his now-teenaged daughter's behavior. "I'm sure parents know that feeling," Parker says. "There seem to be wardrobes full of clothing that never fitted in the first place or shoes that go out of fashion."

It's hardly the first time Parker's covered a wide range on a record. Although he emerged during the punk explosion with now-classic records such as his 1976 debut "Howlin Wind" and the 1979 masterpiece "Squeezing Out Sparks," Parker's tough, textured music had more to do with R&B and reggae than the three-chord broadsides being played by fellow Brits the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

Much of the credit for his sound goes to his band the Rumour, which backed Parker through 1980 and included drummer Steve Goulding, who for many years lived in Chicago and kept the beat for Poi Dog Pondering and the Waco Brothers.

"Him and [Rumour bassist] Andrew Bodner were teenagers when I met them," Parker recalls. "Those guys were playing reggae, and they knew how great Motown bass playing and drumming was."

Goulding, who moved to New York City about a year ago, rejoined Parker for from "Deepcut to Nowhere." "Suddenly I was doing this record upstate, two hours where he was in the city," Parker says. "Boy is he good now. He does some stuff, and you realize the depth and knowledge he has."

Parker has become more sophisticated since his angry-young-man days as well, particularly in his singing. "What I started out with was all scream, ramming it down people's throats," he says. After years of crooning that he thinks veered too far in the opposite direction, "I hit my stride with this album. I combined my early raunch with the subtlety I developed."

For all the ground Parker's covered and perspective he's gained over the last quarter-century, he says "I still feel the songs are kind of the same as they always were, the attitude of them. They don't get kind of gloppy."

"I've always believed that the object of writing a song is to send a shiver down people's spine," he continues. "It doesn't matter whether you're doing it with a sinister thing or a thing which is very blissful and sweet."